Early Political Ads Woo Potential Crossover Voters / State now has open primary

Mark Simon, John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writers

Published
4:00 am PST, Monday, December 8, 1997

1997-12-08 04:00:00 PDT REGION -- Al Checchi is spending more than $3 million on an unprecedented series of political ads that talk about education and crime, but never once mention that he's a Democrat.

Darrell Issa has been on the statewide radio waves for weeks with ads that talk about taxes and spending, but never once mention that he's a Republican. The partisan omissions aren't exactly by design. Both campaigns say they're merely trying to introduce the candidates.

But it's not exactly a mistake, either.

Checchi and Issa are just the early shoppers in the new bipartisan marketplace created by the open primary.

They are the first on the airwaves in a new era in which party label is less important than the cross-party appeal a candidate can make by being tough on crime or taxes, or by being a woman.

In the open primary, all voters, even those who are not registered with any political party, will be free to vote across party lines in each of the statewide offices.

The top vote-getter in each party will advance to the November general election.

Checchi, who is a Democrat running for governor, and Issa, who is a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, both plan to adhere to their respective party labels as the campaign advances.

But the continuing emphasis will be on things that appeal across party lines, a strategy usually reserved for a general election.

"You don't emphasize party affiliation in an open primary because the swing voters who would be willing to vote beyond their own party lines are interested primarily in other factors -- the candidate's stand on certain issues or personal characteristics," said Darry Sragow, Checchi's campaign manager.

Even the ads are likely to look a little different with an open primary. The Bay Area, for example, is seeing its first Republican primary spots in memory as Issa blankets the local airwaves.

With even radio time expensive in the major media markets, Republicans in the past have concentrated their primary election efforts in the GOP strongholds of Southern California. But for the past few weeks, Issa has been running radio ads in the Bay Area and on the Central Coast, where Republicans are a lot harder to find.

The 60-second ad itself is a folksy bio of the wealthy Vista businessman, touching on his service in the Army, his success in the electronics industry and his support for Proposition 209, last year's anti-affirmative action measure. What it doesn't mention is that Issa is a Republican.

Issa's opponents in the primary, however, see the ads as more of a product of his bulging bankroll than any great political strategy.

"It's sort of 'have dollars, will advertise,' " scoffed Todd Harris, a spokesman for San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, an announced GOP senatorial candidate. "This has everything to do with the size of his checkbook. Most people in 1997 don't want to focus on an election that's not even in the same year."

Issa and other candidates in next year's primary will be searching for themes that can appeal to independent and crossover voters.

For Checchi, his key crossover issue will be support for a woman's choice to have an abortion, a position Sragow says will be attractive to Republicans turned off by the anti-choice rhetoric of their own party's conservatives.

For Issa, his crossover targets are the Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, drawn by his image as a fiscal conservative.

The crossover strategy is just what the authors had in mind when they crafted the Open Primary initiative that voters adopted in 1996.

"I believe Californians, in particular, are more numerous in the middle than at the edges," said Representative Tom Campbell, R- Campbell, a principal sponsor of the measure who is widely regarded as someone who would be a U.S. senator today had the open primary been in effect in 1992.

Campbell, a fiscal conservative who is liberal on some key social issues such as abortion, ran in the Republican senatorial primary, losing to conservative TV commentator Bruce Herschensohn by 60,176 votes -- a little more than 2 percent of the total votes cast.

With his moderate record, Campbell and his key political advisers believe he would have defeated Democrat Barbara Boxer in the 1992 general election by portraying her as an extreme liberal.

Boxer, handily winning her own primary, instead faced Herschensohn and was able to depict him as an extreme conservative.

"The most liberal of the three Democratic candidates and the most conservative of the three Republican candidates each won," said Campbell. "A vast percentage of the voters in the middle did not feel comfortable with either choice."

Now, party constraints have been lifted, and Campbell and others say voters are going to be eager to vote for the most attractive candidate, regardless of party affiliation.

They say the most likely election in which voters will cross party lines is again in the Senate race, where Boxer is running for re- election.

Boxer is unopposed, while three Republicans are running -- Issa, a Vista multimillionaire who says he will self-finance his campaign; state Treasurer Matt Fong; and San Diego Mayor Golding.

The fact that one party has a contested race and the other does not creates a situation ripe for cross-party voting, says Campbell, who has endorsed Golding.

He calls it "demand-side politics."

Golding campaign consultant George Gorton says as many as 25 percent of one party's voters will cross to the other party, drawn to a contested race like moths to a flame.

"People will switch parties for their own reasons. They're not necessarily political reasons. People will switch for gender reasons to vote for a woman in the primary and ethnic reasons," he said.

For that reason, Fong will benefit, too, said Gorton, attracting Democrats of Asian descent who will ignore party labels to support a person of similar ethnic background.

But others are more skeptical that voters will blithely cast aside decades of partisan voting habits.

If the Golding camp thinks she's going to be the Republican nominee because she can appeal to Democrats, "I think they're deluding themselves," said Roy Behr, chief political adviser for Boxer.

"It's very clear that the Golding campaign has concluded that they cannot win among Republicans and so, in desperation, they've seized upon the open primary as a rationale for her candidacy," Behr said.